how this product supports application development in Microstation? does it add some more functions to mdl or will it use some dlm-solution? how much one have to make his own custom code to.... 1) make a connection to SDE Server? 2) 'save' current design file to a database? 3) make spatial query from the database and get the geometery back to a design-file? 4) customize one of the loaded elements and update all the stuff back to the database?

what's the support concerning spatial data stored in SDE by other software? e.g can Microstation create elements from SDE-geometry created by ArcView or by some own custom c-app?